QUOTE(Abd @ Sat 30th July 2011, 2:19am)
QUOTE(powercorrupts @ Fri 29th July 2011, 7:02pm)
What we are seeing is that arbcom are consistently what most normal people would call 'unprofessional'. I'm wondering if it's actually professionalism which these level of Wikipedians have a kind of fear or hatred of. There could even be a general contempt for it across Wikipedia.
No shit, Sherlock.
I do wonder why anyone would expect the arbitrators to be "professional," and I've seen the same comment made about administrators.
None of them are paid. They are largely selected for popularity, not for any kind of "professional" competence.
Supermajority election of administrators ensures that the community is badly represented by the administrative core, and the same is true of arbitrators.
It's like clockwork.
Careful, now.
They are selected for popularity from amongst the largest collection of immature, maladjusted shut-ins on the face of the planet. As I wrote elsewhere, the group of the most active wikipedians make a group of rabid Star Trek fans look vanilla plain by comparison.
Arbcom is unaccountable and is thus incorrigible. The stratification of rank and obsession regarding relative status makes wikipedia a classic example of the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.